All Fours by Miranda July is a novel about what happens when creativity, peri-menopause, lingering trauma from a premature birth, and an emotionally and sexually distant marriage collide in an existential crisis. 

All of the hormones that made me want to seem approachable so I could breed are gone and replaced by hormones that are fiercely protective of my autonomy and freedom

The 45 year old narrator (unnamed) is an artist who became mildly famous at a young age and works in several mediums. She lives in California with her husband Harris and their non-binary child Sam. After getting an unexpected windfall from a piece of work she completed, and dealing with a creative block, she decides to take a solo road trip across the country to New York. Her best friend Jordi encourages her to spent the windfall on beauty. The trip will give her time to think and reevaluate life and a stay in the Carlye will be luxurious. Much of the story is relayed via phone calls between our narrator and Jordi with whom she shares everything.

Each person does the amount of lying that is right for them. You have to know yourself and fulfill the amount of untruth that your constitution requires.

Twenty minutes from home she has an encounter with a young man, Davey, who cleans her windscreen and they meet again at the place she stops to eat. She books overnight in a motel in the town. Then she decides to stay there rather than drive to New York and spends twenty thousand dollars commissioning Davey’s wife Claire to redesign the motel room. Over the next three weeks she has an intense emotional liaison with Davey.

A lot of women destroy their lives in their forties and then one day they wake up with no periods and no partner and only themselves to blame

When she returns home she cannot shake her obsession with Davey, dissatisfaction with her marriage, and her changing hormones. 

The women I dated were often my age, that was fine. But the men always had to be older than me because if they were my same age then it became too obvious how much more powerful I was and this was a turnoff for both of us. Men needed a head start for it to be even.

I loved the strange idiosyncratic subversion of this novel and the naked examination of the narrators interiority and fantasies. Skilfully crafted and brimming with funny one liners All Fours is a novel about women questioning in mid-life. A must read for women of a certain age.